A Puppy frugal installation is performed by extracting the contents of the container file (either ISO or ZIP) to normally one, i.e. the same, directory on any desired FAT32, NTFS or EXT4 formatted partition. Let that desired partition be known as the target partition since one is aiming to install to it. That partition may be located on either an external device {e.g. U.S.B. flash memory drive (often erroneously referred to as memory stick), S.D. flash memory card, etc.}, or, an internal device (usually a hard disk drive).

If the target partition or drive contains any personally important files copy them elsewhere if required, because they will be destroyed when formatting.

The target device is the device which contains the partition that one aims to install to, such as an external flash memory drive or an internal hard disk drive. Such a device must have a partition with a minimum size of 256MB.

Usually one has to have already an existing Puppy installation and so the following three steps assume that one is running Puppy Linux. If one is running Microsoft Windows go to Appendix 1 below.

copy from the ISO (or ZIP) directory to the target device the files: vmlinuz, initrd.gz, and all those with the extension .sfs (if more than one Puppy version is to be installed ensure that they are each contained within their own directory)